La interpretación de Descartes en Keiji Nishitani: transcurso y destino del sujeto moderno

Šiuolaikinėje kontinentinėje filosofijoje dažna yra karteziškojo subjekto kritika ir bandymai su­kurti post-subjektiyvistinę filosofiją. Vakarų kultūros žmonės dažnai apibūdinami kaip gyvenantys nuolatinėje tapatybės krizėje. Klausimas „kas bus po subjekto?“ yra kertinis tiek filosofijoje, tiek vakariečių kasdienybėje. Šiame tarpdalykiniame tyrime mes teigiame, jog esama rimtų šeiminių panašumų tarp post-subjektyvistinės filosofijos ir animistinės religijos tikslų. Pirmiausia aprašomi trys principai, sudarantys kontekstą, be kurio neįmanoma suprasti animistinės subjektyvumo traktuotės: Vienybės principas, Pusiausvyros principas ir Poliarinių priešybių mąstymas. Šie principai toliau plėtoja tinklinio mąstymo idėją, aprašytą ankstesniame mūsų straipsnyje. Paskui palyginama animistinė subjektyvumo traktuotė su šiuolaikine subjekto kritika. Nors ir nekeliame normatyvaus reikalavimo prikelti animizmą, negalime atmesti galimybės, jog animistinių principų tyrimas sudarys prielaidas lokaliems postmodernios subjekto krizės sprendimams.

The Cartesian cogito—the principle articulated by Descartes that think, therefore I am—is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito's agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, Cogito and the Unconscious explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which think, therefore I am becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist.Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian subject of the unconscious, the contributors follow Lacan's plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject's confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Žižek's readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena—from the sadist paradoxes of Kant's moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand's novels, from the question Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito? to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences.Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. Cogito and the Unconscious will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology. Contributors. Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

Resumo: Este artigo discute a problemática do sujeito no âmbito do movimento pós-estruturalista, sobretudo na epistemologia lacaniana, e seu rompimento com a visão tradicional do sujeito na modernidade, refletindo sobre sua influência nas teorias organizacionais. O sujeito moderno é o sujeito do cogito cartesiano, pleno e autoconsciente. Os apontamentos de Nietzsche e, sobretudo, de Lacan desconstroem os traços essencialistas do sujeito cartesiano para pôr em seu lugar um sujeito que se constitui na e pela linguagem. Essa qualidade ontológica do ser não permite seu fechamento em uma identidade fixa. Em Lacan, o sujeito é sempre falta-a-ser, que se move de identificação em identificação, em uma contingência necessária e estruturante.

Reviewed by: Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain Christopher Kark Robert Folger . Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain. Chapel Hill, NC: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 2009. Print. 190 pp. Robert Folger's Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain is a landmark study on pre-Enlightenment subjectivity based on primary texts from the Early Modern period. Referencing an array of literary works, Aristotelian faculty psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and recent scholarship on the concept of self during the Renaissance, the author contends that Diego de San Pedro's sentimental work Cárcel de amor signals a transition from a premodern to a decidedly modern selfhood, stemming in part from the impact of the printing press. While previous studies on the topic draw from 20th century continental philosophy, epitomized in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Folger is loath to force early [End Page 1167] modern subjectivity into a postmodernist framework. Instead, his central claim is that premodern selfhood emerges from a way of seeing and being seen, one that potentiates self-formation out of gazes and images. This process consists of an accumulation of an individual's mental structures, which underlies questions of gender anxiety and subjectivity throughout Cárcel. Escape takes a two-pronged approach to premodern selfhood, first unpacking the concept itself and then relating it to lovesickness in Cárcel. Folger notes that in faculty psychology, the self is not conceived in the Cartesian terms of interiority and exteriority, but is instead interlocked with its immediate environment. In other words, the premodern self rises out of the penetration of forms (species) emitted by physical objects into the brain, passing from the imagination, then onto judgment, after which they settle in the memory as mental imagines. This markedly Aristotelian model of perception treats images as sine qua non for thought, a stark contrast with the Cartesian subject, for whom images are visual deceptions. That worldly images are part and parcel of the premodern self suggests, as faculty psychology's exponents stress, that sight and selfhood are inextricably linked. Whereas in the modern age sight is purely ocular, in premodern faculty psychology it is a visual and tactile interaction between a sensing body and the species it perceives. Put another way, if modern selfhood hinges on the separation of interiority from exteriority, where the former always supersedes the latter, its premodern counterpart is a speculum mundi structured by an imbrication of images that throw that separation into question. After outlining faculty psychology's conception of the human mind, Folger homes in on its relation to lovesickness and the "caloric" definition of gender. Those struck with a bout of lovesickness (amor heroes) contemplate a member of the opposite sex, whose appearance is refracted as a mental image. The beholder affixes judgments to the image, the result of which is a pathological infatuation with the image rather than the original desideratum. Sustained contemplation of the mental image upsets the natural balance between the humors, which, if left untreated, leads to melancholy. According to Folger, lovesickness is a template for premodern subjectification that sheds light on Cárcel de amor's opening scene. The young nobleman Leriano has a chance encounter with Deseo, a savage knight, who in lieu of sword carried a stone-cut image of Laureola, the princess of Macedonia. Transfixed by the image's beauty, Leriano falls into the throes of lovesickness. In encountering his beastly alter ego and image of desire, he steps into a field of gazes that spur his headlong rush into passion and, consequently, shape his subjectivity. In order to flesh out the "caloric" nature of Leriano's lovesickness and, by extension, premodern selfhood, Folger takes a brief detour to Grimalte y Gradissa (1495), a visionary sequel to Giovanni Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (c. 1343) authored by Juan de Flores. Just as Leriano has his unruly double in Deseo, Flores' protagonist Grimalte scours Asia's backlands for a quarter-century before finding Pamphilo, now an unkempt hermit. In recognizing themselves in a beastly double...

Augustine and Modernity is a fresh and challenging addition to current debates about the Augustinian origins of modern subjectivity and the Christian genesis of Western nihilism. It firmly rejects the dominant modern view that the modern Cartesian subject, as an archetype of Western nihilism, originates in Augustine's thought. Arguing that most contemporary interpretations misrepresent the complex philosophical relationship between Augustine and modern philosophy, particularly with regard to the work of Descartes, the book examines the much overlooked contribution of Stoicism to the genealogy of modernity, producing a scathing riposte to commonly-held versions of the 'continuity thesis'. Michael Hanby identifies the modern concept of will that emerges in Descartes' work as the product of a notion of self more proper to Stoic theories of immanence than to Augustine's own rigorous understandings of the Trinity, creation, self and will. Though Augustine's encounter with Stoicism ultimately resulted in much of his teaching being transferred to Descartes and other modern thinkers in an adulterated form, Hanby draws critical attention to Augustine's own disillusionment with Stoicism and his interrogation of Stoic philosophy in the name of Christ and the Trinity. Representing a new school of theology willing to engage critically with other disciplines and to challenge their authority, Augustine and Modernity offers a comprehensive new interpretation of De Trinitate and of Augustinian concepts of will and soul. Revealing how much of what is now thought of as 'Augustinian' in fact has its genealogy in Stoic asceticism, it interprets the modern nihilistic Cartesian subject not as a logical consequence of a true Christian Trinitarian theology, but rather of its perversion and abandonment.

Recent years have seen an increased presence of Japanese Buddhist philosophy in the world of Anglophone scholarship. In 2013 the first issue of the Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press) appeared, in 2015 the first issue of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy (SUNY Press) was released, and in 2016 the first issue of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy (Chisokudō Publications) was published. Japanese Buddhist philosophy emerges and exists at the intersection of Buddhist and Japanese philosophy. The history of the term “Buddhist philosophy” in Japan commences with the encounter between the Japanese and Euro-American intellectual traditions during the Meiji period (1868–1912). As is well known, Nishi Amane 西周 (b. 1829–d. 1897) coined the Japanese word for “philosophy”: tetsugaku哲学. He utilized this concept to refer to European and American philosophy and to distinguish these traditions from the works of the Japanese traditions, including Japanese Buddhism, which he classified as “thought” (shisō思想). Today’s understanding of “philosophy” has somewhat shifted. Rein Raud suggests that “[w]hat matters” for philosophers . . . is “interpretations, their quality, their productivity for further thought.” “Buddhist philosophy,” Dale Wright proposes, “is that form of reflection [the effort to ‘understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together’] as practiced by participants who are Buddhists”; that is, “philosophy practiced by those who regard themselves as Buddhist.” By the same token, Inoue Enryō 井上円了 (b. 1858–d. 1919) asserted with the very title of his 1893 work Buddhist Philosophy (Bukkyō tetsugaku仏教哲学) that there is Buddhist philosophy in Japan, premodern, modern, and contemporary. This bibliographic essay includes Anglophone texts in the Japanese Buddhist tradition published after the Meiji restoration (1868 ce). The titles are divided into four categories: (1) Translations, (2) Collections, (3) English-Language Works, and (4) Crossover Works. Unfortunately, a lot of brilliant philosophy produced in Japan is only accessible in the Japanese language. Recent years have seen exciting trends and stimulating ideas in the field of Japanese Buddhist philosophy. The disaster of 3/11, for example, has even given rise to the category of “post-Fukushima” philosophy. The purpose of this bibliographical essay is thus twofold. It is the hope of the editors that this bibliography will help raise the awareness of the wealth and significance of the Japanese Buddhist traditions. At the same time, this essay on modern and contemporary Japanese Buddhist philosophy is designed to encourage scholars to generate more translations in this field.

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in René Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. While unravelling the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,” the analysis highlights a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere, a living Cartesian ghost. This effort at revitalizing and reframing the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces, also involves reflecting on some of the trends in contemporary Cartesian scholarship while putting Descartes in dialogue with a host of twentieth century and contemporary Continental philosophers ranging from Edmund Husserl, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou among others.

Japanese philosophy can be viewed, in a very simple way, as consisting of three historical phases: the classical thought, modern philosophy, and contemporary philosophy. In the first and classical phase, theoretical speculation in Japan is usually seen as a variation of East Asian intellectual tradition. Japanese thinkers from the seventh century to the eighteenth century used to work in this cultural sphere, which basically consists of Confucianism and Sinicized Buddhism, using classical Chinese for formal writing; they are by no means blind followers of Chinese thinkers, contributing to the development of philosophical speculation in the East Asian framework. During the Edo period (1603–1868), however, some thinkers started to depart from this framework by drawing either on the indigenous culture or on the knowledge of occidental civilization, which eventually led to the modernization, or Westernization, of Japanese society. The second, or modern, phase of Japanese philosophy began with the full-fledged introduction of Western philosophy during the Meiji period (1868–1912). As a result, there arose a theoretical task to synthesize Eastern and Western frameworks, and many pioneering works were produced in the first half of the twentieth century. The best-known modern Japanese philosopher is Nishida Kitarō (b. 1870–d. 1945). The Kyoto school of philosophy was formed through his influence, which shares the ambition to make “contributions to philosophy” with the Eastern tradition—especially Mahayana Buddhism—in the background. However, the Kyoto school had fallen into disrepute in the mid-twentieth century when Japan underwent a tremendous social and cultural change. The third and contemporary phase of Japanese philosophy spans from the postwar reconstruction of Japan to the present, when eminent researchers gather in the University of Tokyo and lead philosophical studies under the framework either of analytic or continental context, mostly refraining from mentioning the Eastern tradition. Recent philosophical research in Japan is increasingly getting free from such academic frameworks, producing some remarkable results; however, most of these contemporary works remain little known overseas.

A Comparison of Watsuji's Fūdo and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:Questioning an Equivalence between Japaneseness and Postmodernity Harumi Osaki (bio) Presenting Japanese philosophy in terms of its similarity to so-called French postmodern thought seems to be a common approach in recent times. Aside from the still-open question "What is postmodern thought?," a popular summary of postmodernism (and one often invoked to draw parallels with Japanese philosophy) is that there is no such thing as subject or object, only relations—or more precisely, genuine relationality that exists prior not only to the subject and object but also to their concrete relations. Also invoked as a similarity is the postmodern criticism of the Cartesian subject, characterized by its solipsism. The centrality of this subjectivity in Western modern philosophy and science is said to result in humanity's selfish and dogmatic domination of others, either human or nonhuman, as mere objects. It is thus argued that if we stop privileging the subject over the object and instead draw upon the relationality that is prior to both, humanity will avoid such evils and can realize more open and fairer relations with others. A not-insignificant number of scholars assert that Japanese philosophers have theorized such a concept of relationality and thus provided a vision for the harmonious coexistence of everyone or everything, either in opposition to or independent of Western modernity. Along these lines, it is argued that French postmodern thought and Japanese philosophy are aligned in their challenges to Western modernity. What is troublesome here is that these comparisons and associations of formal similarities between Japanese philosophy and French postmodern thought often end up reconfirming commonly accepted cultural stereotypes of the East and the West, for example, that the rational subject is an essentially Western agent or that the essence of Oriental culture consists of the absence of such a subject. Furthermore, there is a recurrent claim that Japanese philosophy—or Japanese tradition itself—heralded Western postmodernity. While some connect postmodernism (as we understand it [End Page 107] today) to early-twentieth-century Japanese philosophical thought, others arbitrarily discern postmodern elements in Japanese tradition and history dating back hundreds or even thousands of years. Many academics tend to accept such conclusions as a strategy for increasing the status of non-Western philosophy, which is still undervalued compared to Western philosophy. However, this approach also entails a number of problems, which have largely been disregarded. While the consideration of Japanese philosophy or tradition through the lens of its similarities with French postmodern thought may seem to offer a perspective freed from ethnocentrism, this is not necessarily the case. Quite often, claims that spotlight the similarities between Japanese philosophy or tradition and French postmodern thought imply that Japan is intrinsically postmodern and, as such, that it not only exceeded Western modernity but also foreran Western postmodernity. Here, the link between Japanese philosophy or tradition and French postmodernism is used as a means to buttress Japano-centrism rather than to undermine it.1 On the other hand, analysis of French postmodern thought through the lens of its similarities with Japanese philosophy and tradition may seem to counter the Western-centrism that dominates the field of philosophy. However, this is too optimistic of an interpretation, as many postmodern thinkers' depictions of non-Western cultures are full of Orientalist prejudice and misplaced idealization.2 Nevertheless, French postmodern thought's alleged similarities with Japanese philosophy and tradition provide a pretext that allows such prejudice and idealization to persist and be tolerated. Thus, the emphasis upon apparent similarities between Japanese philosophy and tradition and French postmodern thought does not help counter Japano-centrism or Western-centrism in either discipline, but rather nurtures these phenomena stealthily. Moreover, when the alliance between Japanese philosophy or tradition and French postmodern thought is celebrated under the banner of the criticism of Western modernity, it is largely disregarded that allegedly "postmodern" characters of Japanese philosophy or tradition are often interlaced with oppressive power structures that have remained unchallenged since before so-called modern times. Such celebration also disregards the fact that criticism of the West from within it still often presupposes the exploitation of the cultural Other in...

Reviewed by: Das Handeln der Tiere. Tierliche Agency im Fokus der Human-Animal Studies ed. by Sven Wirth, et al Caroline Schaumann Das Handeln der Tiere. Tierliche Agency im Fokus der Human-Animal Studies. Edited by Sven Wirth, Anett Laue, Markus Kurth, Katharina Dornenzweig, Leonie Bossert, and Karsten Balgar. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. Pp. 269.Paper €29.99. ISBN 978-3837632262. For the first text in German on the topic of animal agency, Das Handeln der Tiere, published by the Berlin-based working group Chimaira, expectations come as high as they are wide-ranging. As one can see from the proliferating number of publications on human-animal studies by Chimaira and others since 2011, this is a new but rapidly expanding field, crossing boundaries of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, biology, literature, creative arts, and cultural studies. While pioneering work has been done mostly on human-animal relationships, such as ethical concerns in the context of food studies, other areas remain untouched. All the more welcome then is this contribution to the field along with the other work of the Chimaira group, two new professorships in human-animal studies in Germany, an extensive and up-to-date website (http://www.human-animal-studies.de), and several academic lectures and seminars on the topic. With its jargon-free and precise language, definition of multifarious terms and concepts such as "animal," "agency," or "new materialism," and summary of existing theories and research, Das Handeln der Tiere offers a much-needed introduction while simultaneously driving the field forward with its multifaceted investigations. The introduction examines concepts of subjectivity from Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant in order to delineate the Cartesian subject of the Enlightenment emerging from a dismissal of God's omnipotence and a clear demarcation between the sensual and the rational. Accordingly, this model traditionally insists on a strict separation between human and animal, assigning agency to humans alone. Newer definitions however, including the book at hand, have repeatedly shifted the boundaries between humans and animals, if not questioned them altogether. The first part of this volume explores theoretical concepts of animal agency from a historical, philosophical, ethical, and sociological perspective, whereas the second part reflects on concrete instances of animal cooperation, resistance, and interaction that can be conceptualized as nonhuman agency. Taking into consideration linguistic competence, moral consciousness, willed and unwilled actions, consequences, and economic developments, Mieke Roscher offers a helpful introduction to the historical development of the concept agency and competing contemporary theories such as relational agency, embodied agency, animal agency, and entangled agency. Dominik Ohren complements this groundwork by delineating a postanthropocentric ontology of the body through a more focused exploration of concepts such as autonomy, receptivity, vulnerability, and transcorporeality by Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, Judith Butler, and Stacy Alaimo. Accordingly, [End Page 712] these essays present pressing questions of current research, providing an overview of existing theories and secondary literature. The additional essays continue in this vein, with Leonie Bossert juxtaposing concepts of moral agency in Marc Bekoff's and Jessica Pierce's Wild Justice (2009) and Mark Rowlands's Can Animals be Moral (2012), and Sven Wirth discussing Donna Haraway's notion of animal rights and ethics as well as the controversy it sparked. While these well-researched contributions do not shy away from critically evaluating existing work, they tend to rehearse research rather than develop new concepts. Most of the theories mentioned come from the Anglophone context, forcing contributors to rely on either awkward translation into German or the heavy use of English terms, which both can make the reading process a bit tedious. An exception here is Karsten Balgar's essay that, on the basis of theories by Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, stakes out new ground defining animal embodiment. The book's second part provides some specific examples that help ground the theoretical claims. Katharina Dornenzweig's essay on language experiments with primates stands out as a particularly valuable piece of scholarship: Dornenzweig cites theories of language competence from Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger, and contemporary philosophers, before critically evaluating language experiments with apes beginning in the 1970s. In what Dornenzweig calls a "new anthropocentrism," humans are seen not only as part of nature, but as the...

The modern city ethos has been a significant subject in social and literary theories since Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century poet and author. Baudelaire's interest in the relationship between city imageries and modernity has inspired many of his successors that look at politics, culture, gender, phenomenology, and ontology. Thus, contemporary philosophy has approached the modern city as an intersectional sphere of existence. The two prominent 20th-century thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre endeavor to use Baudelaire's work as a theoretical structure to ground their understanding of the modern city ethos. Benjamin uses Baudelaire's concept of flâneur, which initially symbolizes the idle, extraordinary, and lonely individuals in early modern cities, to interpret the experience of modernity. Sartre includes city characters that resemble flâneur in his novels and essays to disclose his existentialist thought. Both see the tension between modernity and the city ethos as an enigma that produces alienation, exploitation, and exclusion. In this study, we analyze the thoughts of Benjamin and Sartre regarding the problem of existence in modern cities. First, we look at the concept of flâneur as a subject of modernity. Then we respectively explain the thinkers' works, thus emphasizing their differences. We argue that Benjamin ascribes a relatively sociocultural context to the modern city experience, while Sartre mainly looks at the problem from a phenomenological perspective.

The main theme of the new philosophical monograph by Professor Marko Uršič entitled Reflections of the Land of the Rising Sun is a philosophical, comparative-religious and existential-experiential reflection of Japanese Buddhism, especially of two important branches within the Buddhist "Great Vehicle" (māhāyana): the "pan­theistic" kegon Buddhism (in Chinese: hua-yan) and meditative Zen (chan). Special emphasis is placed on the interpretation of Buddhism within the "Kyoto School", the main direction in Japanese philosophy of the 20th century (Nishida, Nishitani, Tanabe, etc.), as well as the relationship between Japanese and Western philosophy (from Platonism to phenomenology and existentialism). The author interprets a topic that is relatively unknown in Slovenia in a philosophically innovative, thought-reflec­tive and personally engaged way, intertwining the "internal" and "external" aspects: he connects the spiritual journey through the ancient Buddhist sutras and the intel­lectual reflection of the contemporary Japanese philosophy with personal impres­sions on his meditative journey through Japanese Buddhist temples and gardens a few years ago. At the same time, this book deals philosophically, sometimes criti­cally, with relations between East and West, both in the past and in the present. – The book comprises three parts, three sets of shorter, condensed, chained and cross-linked "mosaic" philosophical sequences: the first part focuses on the role of reflections in Buddhism ("Indra's net"), i.e., the interconnectedness of all beings and things. The second part is a philosophical analysis of the concept of "non-self" in Buddhist phi­losophy (anātman, Jap. muga), also comparatively with the Western conception of self and/or ego (subject); in the third part, the focus is on Zen Buddhism as a mental and meditative experience of "being here-and-now", i.e. in the author's homeland Slovenia, at the village in the Karst region, where he lives and writes; last but not least, of particular interest is the treatment of the relationship between Buddhism and Japanese haiku poetry, enhanced with author’s own haiku verses.

Reviewed by: Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work Gereon Kopf Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. By Reinhard May. Translated with a complementary essay by Graham Parkes. London and New York:Routledge, 1996. Pp. xviii + 121. Reinhard May's Ex Oriente Lux: Heidegger's Werk Unter Ostasiatischen Einfluss (1989), translated into English by Graham Parkes as Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, makes a significant contribution to the growing body of work that explores the intellectual connections between early twentieth-century German philosophers and Chinese classical texts on the one side and contemporary Japanese philosophers on the other. In particular, May explores similarities [End Page 122] between the work of Martin Heidegger and contemporary translations of Taoist writings available to and known by Heidegger such as Martin Buber's Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (1910), Richard Wilhelm's Laotse: Tao te King: Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (1911), Jan Ulenbrook's Lao Tse: Tao te King: Das Buch vom Rechten Weg and von der rechten Gesinnung (1980), and Paul Shih-yi Hsiao's translation of the Tao te Ching. Hsiao himself describes the latter project in his "Heidegger and our Translation of the Tao te Ching," which was published in Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987). On the basis of this comparative reading, May argues that Heidegger's essay "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache," published in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1953/1954), constitutes a fictionalization of the conversation he had with the Japanese Germanist Tezuka Tomio and, ultimately, a confession of his indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese philosophy. May's argument evolves in four steps. In chapter 1, he establishes Heidegger's familiarity with the above-cited German translations of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi as well as with the fundamental Taoist concepts. May cites Heidegger's correspondence with Hsiao on their collaborative translation of the Laozi as well as commentaries by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet and Otto Pöggeler, who document Heidegger's familiarity with the translations by Buber and Ulenbrook, and thus establishes Hei-degger's knowledge of fundamental Taoist ideas and writings. In his second chapter, May reads Heidegger's "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache" in light of Tezuka's own account of their conversation and concludes that Heidegger poetically constructs his version in order to support his own philosophy and, ultimately, as May argues in chapter 5, to confess his intellectual debt to the Japanese philosophical tradition. May suggests that a note at the end of Unterwegs zur Sprache, which claims that the conversation that "has remained unpublished for some time, originates in 1953/4, and was occasioned by a visit from Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo" (p. 14), is "clearly incomplete and inaccurate" (p. 14). In addition, May cites discrepancies between the accounts of Heidegger and Tezuka with regard to crucial aspects of their conversation: while Tezuka observes "that the kind of indefiniteness conveyed by this film [Rashmon] concerning our knowledge of reality may have intrigued Heidegger as an East Asian phenomenon," Heidegger makes his Japanese interlocutor say that "[w]e Japanese are not disconcerted when a conversation leaves indefinite [im Unbestimmten] what is really meant" (p. 14). Similar discrepancies can be observed in their accounts of passages dealing with the Japanese rendition of the Heart Sūtra's shiki soku ze kū and the Japanese word kotoba. Tezuka's own report furthermore emphasizes Hei-degger's tendency to force similarities, as in the case of Heidegger's rendition of kotoba as Ding. Confronted with these "indications," May concludes that Heidegger did not report a conversation but rather presented a fictionalized conversation in such a way as to enable the readers to mistake it for the historical record. In chapter 3, May meticulously identifies similarities between Heidegger's work and the German translations of the Laozi and Zhuangzi to which Heidegger had access. Thus Heidegger paraphrases von Strauss' observation "that one is only [End Page 123] through the other" as "the Other to it [Being] is simply Nothing"; "Being and Nothing are not given beside one another. Each uses itself on behalf of...

When was the modern ‘self’ born? This question lies at the heart of major debates by contemporary historians and philosophers. What does rabbinic thought have to do with such questions? This essay examines a pivotal debate in modern rabbinic thought concerning the nature of intentionality in prayer. The analysis centers on R. Chaim Soloveichik of Brisk’s (1853–1918) revolutionary distinction between two forms of intention in prayer. R. Chaim argued that the conscious experience of divine presence is conditional to define prayer. By tracing the precedents and critics of this idea, this essay is an exercise in the unwritten history of rabbinic subjectivity.

Nishitani’s later works, particularly the seminal essay “Kū to soku” and several lectures given at Ōtani University, were devoted to thinking about image and imagination. In this article, I try to reconstruct Nishitani’s theory of imagination in light of these writings. I discuss the role that imagination plays in his philosophical project and how his ideas can contribute to philosophically understanding the phenomenon of imagination itself. The paper starts from Nishitani’s conception of the “elemental imagination”, closely related to Aristotle’s phantasia, from which, according to the Japanese philosopher, artistic and religious images emerge. Since this raises the question of the degree of reality accorded to the imagined and of the cognitive and affective value attributed to artistic and religious images, then the question of the ontology of images in the Greek, Christian and Buddhist traditions, in which the image serves as a means of manifesting the real, is examined. Finally, since Nishitani’s theory of imagination moves between the being and non-being of images, their subjectification and objectification, an attempt is made to situate it with respect to two opposing tendencies in contemporary philosophy, i.e., to recover the ontophanic value of images or to de-ontologize them.